This invention concerns a supporting plate for flexible base supports for electronic circuits, particularly for base supports made with very thin sheets of alumina and plastic materials, commonly known as xe2x80x9cgreen-tapexe2x80x9d.
The plate according to the invention is able to support the sheets of green-tape so as to be able to move them and stack them up, keeping them flat and horizontal, during the different working stages of a device which is able to perform three different operations: to deposit the conductor material by means of serigraphy to embody the conductor tracks, the drying operation in the oven, and also the cooling operation.
One of the techniques well-known in the production of electronic circuits is to use as a base support one or more sheets of insulating material, consisting of alumina or synthetic materials, according to the green-tape technology.
In conventional appliances, the green-tape supports are normally arranged one in front of the other on rectilinear guides along which they are made to advance in sequence, by means of a feed mechanism, from a loading station to a printing station where, by means of serigraphy, the conductor material is deposited thereon, in the form of a conductor paste, according to a pre-defined mask. Subsequently, each support is introduced into a drying oven, at a temperature of at least 120xc2x0 C. for the time needed to make the conductor paste set.
After they have been dried in the oven, the supports are cooled in a suitable cooling chamber.
Normally therefore, the green-tape supports cannot be stacked up one on top of the other, since the conductor paste cannot be touched by anything before it is permanently fixed to the underlying base support.
It is for this reason that conventional devices have the disadvantage of being very bulky, with a linear development of several tens of metres. This depends on the fact that all the steps described above occur in serial sequence, with the base supports always kept one next to the other on the same horizontal plane.
The present Applicant has devised and embodied the supporting plate for flexible base supports for electronic circuit according to the invention to overcome these shortcomings.
The supporting plate for flexible base supports for electronic circuits according to the invention is set forth and characterized in the main claim, while the dependent claims describe other innovative features of the invention.
One purpose of the invention is to achieve a supporting plate for flexible base supports for electronic circuits which will be rigid and stackable, so that the base supports resting thereon can be stacked up too.
Another purpose of the invention is to achieve a supporting plate which will allow to support flexible base supports of different sizes and that the latter can easily be positioned with respect to the plate itself to be subjected to subsequent operations, that is, depositing the conductor paste, drying and cooling.
In accordance with these purposes, the supporting plate according to the invention is made of rigid material, comprises a plane supporting surface for the flexible base supports and is provided with spacer elements protruding orthogonally from the plane surface to allow another supporting plate to be placed on top, stacking up without interfering with the base support resting on the plane surface.
According to another characteristic of the invention, the plate according to the invention is provided with a first plurality of holes into which the spacer elements can be removably inserted.
According to another characteristic of the invention, the first plurality of holes is made in a zone near the edges of the plane surface, where the base support does not rest.
According to another characteristic of the invention, the plate comprises a second plurality of through holes, made in a pattern of lines and columns, into which further spacers are able to be removably inserted, to function as lateral positioning elements of the base support, according to the size thereof.